“You cannot see them, see them there, but I can see.
I’m driven onward—nay, no longer might I stay.”
Homer lets Hera, wrangling with Zeus, in regard to Troy, exclaim: “Verily three are the dearest to me among cities: wide-wayed Mycenæ and Sparta and Argos.” The Heræum, the ancient sanctuary of the goddess, once belonged to Mycenæ, and traces of the Cyclopean road that connected them are still visible. Here the “kings” took the oath of allegiance before sailing to Troy with Agamemnon and Menelaus. Here on their return the Argives dedicated the Trojan spoils to Hera. The herald in the “Agamemnon” says:—
“While speeding over land and sea, to yonder light,
The sun’s light, it is fitting that we make this vaunt:
‘Once, sacking Troy, an Argive host to gods of Greece
Nailed up these spoils, a glorious heirloom in their halls.’”
Among the spoils was the shield of the Trojan hero Euphorbus, slain by Menelaus. In the sixth century, Pythagoras, to prove that in a previous round of existence he had been Euphorbus, entered the Heræum and instantly identified the shield as his own.
From Argos to the Heræum it was a distance of more than five miles. Herodotus relates how a woman of Argos, wishing to be present at Hera’s festival, was unable to start because the oxen were not forthcoming in season to draw her car. Her two athlete sons put on the yoke and drew the heavy car quickly across the plain and up the hill. When the Argive women congratulated her on being mother of such sons, she, “exultant over their deed and fame, stood before the statue of Hera and prayed that to her sons, Cleobis and Biton, who had honoured her greatly, the goddess would give whatever gift is best for man to have. And the youths, after sacrifice and banquet, lay down to sleep in the sacred precinct itself and rose up no more.” This answer of the goddess so impressed the Argives that they set up the statues of the young men at Delphi. It pleases the imagination to identify with these the two archaic statues there excavated by the French; and a beautiful Parian marble head of Hera, found by the American excavators of the Heræum, has preserved to us the gracious presentation of the goddess by some great sculptor of the fifth century.
The dramatis personæ of the “Suppliants” of Æschylus vaguely suggest a chapter in the early history of Argolis. Danaus with his fifty daughters comes from the south, fleeing over the sea from his brother Ægyptus and his fifty sons. The early Pelasgian inhabitants of Argos are represented by the king, Pelasgus, who receives the suppliant fugitives into the safe refuge of his Cyclopean walls, which we may identify with the prehistoric Larisa citadel above Argos: “Go get ye to my city fenced with goodly walls, fast locked within the lofty ramparts, subtly wrought.” Henceforward, as in Homer, the Argives and Danai are convertible names. All objection to the newcomers as foreigners is neutralized by realizing that they have only returned to their original home. Inachus, the river god, was the father of Io, who, half transformed into a heifer by the jealousy of Hera, had been made to wander frenzied over land and water until in Egypt she brought forth a son, the great-grandfather of this same Danaus.